Guitar Hero not dead, just ‘on hiatus’

Activision has continued its awkward three-point-turn on the fate of Guitar Hero, and now claims that the series isn’t dead – it’s just resting.

Guitar Hero – it’s only mostly dead

‘Actually, just to clarify, we’re just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus, we’re not ending it,’ said Activision head of developer relations Dan Winters to industry website GamesIndustry.biz .

‘We’re releasing products out of the vault – we’ll continue to sustain the channel, the brand won’t go away. We’re just not making a new one for next year, that’s all,’ he added.

Back in February Activision announced that they were no longer planning to make any new music games at all, including Guitar and DJ Hero. This didn’t seem to be an idle threat at the time as they also made redundant 500 staff from various developers, reducing many studios to a skeleton staff.

But whatever reprieve Guitar Hero may have, it’s not being shared by True Crime: Hong Kong, at least not thanks to Activision. According to Winters the game would have only seen average review scores of: ’80 plus. 85 maybe’.

‘In an industry where only the best games in each category are flourishing, to be blunt, it just wasn’t going to be good enough,’ he said.

‘We were really confident that they were tracking towards a very good game. The challenges in the market place right now, when you’re talking about open-world games that are going to compete with titles like Red Dead Redemption, expectations for the consumer are really high,’ he added in semi-contradiction.

He did however give hope that the game could still be picked up by another publisher:

‘That would have been, and still might end up being, a very successful mid-tier opportunity for someone. But, as I said, we changed our business model to where we were going to change our business model [sic] to focus disproportionately on three big, huge monsters. Those three monsters are the Bungie, Call Of Duty and Spyro titles.’